Search This Blog

The loneliness of Elizabeth Bishop

In 1974, Elizabeth Bishop seemed to have all the things a poet could want: a teaching position at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a first-look contract with The New Yorker, which almost always decided to publish her work. And yet she was inconsolably unhappy. “When you write my epitaph,” Bishop said to the poet Robert Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”That year, things only got worse. Bishop’s longtime lover, the Brazilian heiress Lota de Macedo Soares, had committed suicide in her presence in 1967, and her much younger current lover, Alice Methfessel, 31, with blond hair and dazzling eyes of “blue blue blue,” had recently jettisoned Bishop to become engaged to a man. Bishop’s sadness was bottomless: Alcohol could saturate the pain, but never take it away. The trappings of success were preferable to those of failure, but the older and more eminent that Bishop became, the more desperate and needy she grew as well. “Yesterday brought to today so lightly! / (A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift),” Bishop wrote in the poem “Five Flights Up.” But it was also at this low point on her high perch that she wrote, over several painstaking drafts, what became her most anthologized and best-loved poem, “One Art.” It was a work that began as a riffy, associative free-verse rumination on the many kinds of loss but that, in its finished form, became a seamless and airtight villanelle, a form that dates back to the Renaissance. Written in the 1970s, a period experiencing a renaissance of a different sort—punk rock, self-help, singer-songwriters, Studio 54, and the “zipless fuck”—”One Art” made it clear that Bishop’s writing was both antiquated and somehow still of her moment.
Despite her crippling loneliness, Bishop sought out no group for empowerment or support. She kept such matters private, in her fashion, all the way to her death in 1979, at the age of 68. Bishop left behind 100 well-wrought poems, but very few musings on her private life. The entire time that she lived with Lota, who inspired tender, erotic poems like “It is marvellous to wake up together…” and “The Shampoo,” it was merely as her “guest” and “friend.” In fact, Bishop worried about whether the latter poem was too tawdry, despite Lota’s carefully veiled presence; in a letter to the poet and playwright May Swenson, she asked if there was “something indecent about it I’d overlooked.” And when Bishop was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1950, she avoided cruising for women at DC’s version of the Stonewall Inn or anywhere else, aware that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt wasn’t just going after reds; in what was known as the “purge of the perverts,” the government was also rooting out gay and lesbian employees. Officially, Bishop had the honor of representing poetry in America, but she was also in many ways a prisoner of her desires, keeping her head down and determined to avoid the next raid.
One of the brilliant features of Bishop’s writing was that, despite her astonishing control and mastery of forms from centuries past, she had a gushing emotional register just barely below the surface. The effect was subtle, and even at its most pitched tones, one could miss it. But Bishop’s poems were beautifully constructed edifices with emotions that bubbled close enough to the surface for readers to feel and hear them. In these poems she was, as Flaubert might have put it, present everywhere but visible nowhere. Indeed, one of the arts of “One Art” was her ability to hide in plain sight, using antique verse structures to expose the personal wounds that she was simultaneously trying to keep to herself. Several drafts of “One Art” were published posthumously in the controversial Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, a collection of unfinished writing from the ultimate perfectionist poet. The facsimiles are not easy to read, but they’re worth the effort: Within the limitations of the villanelle—19 lines composed of five tercets and a quatrain—there were only so many words to cover losing her father to disease, her mother to an insane asylum, Lota to suicide, and now her “love, love, love,” Alice.
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, the new biography by Megan Marshall (whose previous book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, won the Pulitzer Prize), helps to fill in for devotees of Bishop’s work much of what couldn’t fit into one of her painstakingly perfected poems. And what we learn from Marshall’s book—informed by a mother lode of newly discovered letters—is that none of Bishop’s accomplishments could ever ease the pain of her loneliness.
Read more >>>

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Now, whether it were by peculiar grace. A leading from above, a something given..."
- Wordsworth. Resolution and Independence.
My father wanted to be a writer. I can't remember a time when he didn't want this. There were few mornings when he didn't go to his desk early, at about six o'clock in one of his-many suits and coloured shirts, the cuffs pinned by bejewelled links, before he left for work carrying his briefcase, longside the other commuters. Writing was; I suppose, an obsession, and as with most obsessions, fulfillment remained out of reach. The obsession kept him incomplete but it kept him going. He had a dull, enervating civil service job, and writing provided him with something to look forward to. It gave him meaning and 'direction,' as he liked to put it. It gave him direction home too, since he wrote often about India, the country he left in his early '20s and to which he never returned.
…

In 1935, Diego Rivera masterfully created ‘The Flower Carrier’ (known in its original language as ‘Cargador de Flores’). Like many of Rivera’s paintings, ‘The Flower Carrier’ imparts simplicity, yet exudes much symbolism and meaning. The vibrant colors are rubbed into the masonite, a most common method for painting on hard surfaces.

The colourful painting displays a peasant man in white clothing with a yellow sombrero, struggling on all fours with a dramatically oversized basket of flowers that is strapped to his back with a yellow sling. A woman, most likely the peasant’s wife, stands behind him trying to help with the support of the basket as he attempts to rise to his feet. While the flowers in the basket are strikingly beautiful to the viewer, the man does not see their beauty, but only their value as he carries them to the market for sale or exchange. The geometric shapes offer bold and intense contrasts, with each figure, item, and foliage illustrated to reflect individualism. …

The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. Most were composed in Dickinson’s large, airy bedroom, with two big windows facing south and two facing west, at a small table that her niece described as “18-inches square, with a drawer deep enough to take in her ink bottle, paper and pen.” It looked out over the family’s property on Main Street, in Amherst, Massachusetts, toward the Evergreens, her brother’s grand Italianate mansion, nestled among the pines a few hundred yards away. Dickinson had a Franklin stove fitted to a bricked-up fireplace to keep her warm, which meant that she could write by candlelight, with the door closed, for as long as she wanted. In much of the rest of the house, the winter temperature would have been around fifty degrees. Though she usually composed at night, Dickinson sometimes jotted down lines during the day, while gardening or doing chores, wearing a si…

Popular posts from this blog

"Now, whether it were by peculiar grace. A leading from above, a something given..."
- Wordsworth. Resolution and Independence.
My father wanted to be a writer. I can't remember a time when he didn't want this. There were few mornings when he didn't go to his desk early, at about six o'clock in one of his-many suits and coloured shirts, the cuffs pinned by bejewelled links, before he left for work carrying his briefcase, longside the other commuters. Writing was; I suppose, an obsession, and as with most obsessions, fulfillment remained out of reach. The obsession kept him incomplete but it kept him going. He had a dull, enervating civil service job, and writing provided him with something to look forward to. It gave him meaning and 'direction,' as he liked to put it. It gave him direction home too, since he wrote often about India, the country he left in his early '20s and to which he never returned.
…

It is strange to contemplate the destinies of America’s three most prominent women poets of the post-Bogan-Bishop generation: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. Two of them committed suicide; the third, Adrienne Rich, had a husband who did. Rich eventually turned into the most militant of lesbian feminists, refusing even to talk to men, except on business matters.

I met Plath only once. She was with Peter Davison, the editor-poet, her then lover; we were waiting to get into the Brattle Theater, just off Harvard Square. During a brief conversation, Miss Plath impressed me as rather plain under her defiantly blondined hair, but lively enough for a Smith girl, a part she looked to a “T.” Adrienne Cecile Rich, a Radcliffe undergraduate, signed up for a poetry course given by Archibald Macleish, in which I was her section man, though not for long. She complained to me, and doubtless also to Macleish, that the course wasn’t stimulating enough, and that, as winner of that year’s Ya…

In 1935, Diego Rivera masterfully created ‘The Flower Carrier’ (known in its original language as ‘Cargador de Flores’). Like many of Rivera’s paintings, ‘The Flower Carrier’ imparts simplicity, yet exudes much symbolism and meaning. The vibrant colors are rubbed into the masonite, a most common method for painting on hard surfaces.

The colourful painting displays a peasant man in white clothing with a yellow sombrero, struggling on all fours with a dramatically oversized basket of flowers that is strapped to his back with a yellow sling. A woman, most likely the peasant’s wife, stands behind him trying to help with the support of the basket as he attempts to rise to his feet. While the flowers in the basket are strikingly beautiful to the viewer, the man does not see their beauty, but only their value as he carries them to the market for sale or exchange. The geometric shapes offer bold and intense contrasts, with each figure, item, and foliage illustrated to reflect individualism. …